After working four years at the Children's Television Workshop in the 1970s, Milton Chen was contemplating his next move. He asked CTW director Ed Palmer where he should go to study communication research and kids. Palmer never hesitated: "Stanford is the best place to go."
Stanford in fact has dominated the study of children and the media for four decades. Its leadership began in the 1950s with communication Professor Wilbur Schramm's groundbreaking studies that showed the fledgling television industry had an effect on children. Albert Bandura, the David Starr Jordan Professor of Psychology, followed Schramm with research on how children respond to television violence. His classic Bobo-doll experiments showed direct, causal links between televised violence and subsequent aggression by children.
Their work spawned a second generation of scholars. Don Roberts, the Thomas More Stoke Professor of Communication, co-authored research in 1972 for the U.S. Surgeon General's office substantiating many of Bandura's earlier findings. Roberts went on to examine such issues as the impact of mass media on children's political ideas and values. His later studies proved that children could be taught to be more skeptical of TV commercials. "The evidence is clear that media play a central role in children's lives, as important as parents and teachers," Roberts says.
By the time Chen arrived in 1981, Stanfords scholars were studying the effects of computers on kids. Chen's research concentrated on how high school boys and girls used the technology differently. "Computers and television are merging. They are both screens from which kids acquire knowledge, attitude and behavior," Chen says. Future graduate students may want to pursue that idea--and Chen can point them to "the best place to go."
